This ought to be amusing!

In life, many a time, we embark on something we haven’t tried before, something that is exciting as well as scary, something that, if we do well enough, would bring returns that will be worth the effort, and yet ruin us if we failed. Given the title of this article, the first line is an obvious contradiction! But that’s only because I have this strange belief, that to catch anyone’s attention, one has to maintain a serious expression and start a sentence with “In life….”!

So now, that I have caught all the attention that I want to catch, let me get on with what I was saying. Before I started writing this article, I had a little talk with myself so I could gather enough courage to write this. I didn’t say much, just the clichéd, “It’s just like riding a bicycle! You fall a few times and then you get the knack of it and then its just so much fun!” It worked! And here I am penning some of my worst ramblings ever, complete with a funny title. But now that I think about it, it shouldn’t have worked. Well, for one thing, it isn’t that similar to riding a bicycle. In fact, when I learned to ride one, I never had any misfortunes, not even the customary “heading straight into the ditch”. Of course, this fact worked to my father’s advantage, since he was the unfortunate soul, who would get dragged to the street every evening even after a hard day at office, to run along with an over enthused 7 year old and her bike. Not an enviable role, but my complete lack of conformity to the norms of learning to ride, meant that he didn’t have a bawling, over enthused, 7 year old to console every evening! But, I, more than made up for my lack of bruised knees and hands, by banging into vehicles of all sizes and colours and ending with all kinds of bruises all over me, once I had gotten enough courage to venture out of my secluded street into the bigger roads.

Another reason it shouldn’t have worked is that, the bicycle story is just one of those silly things that people tell themselves in order to do things that they wouldn’t have ordinarily done. But then it works, because for a minute they are taken back to that time in their life when a simple thing like riding a bike was the one thing that could make their lives complete! But personally, I think I like the first reason better!

Although, I have toyed with the idea of writing for quite some time, one of the reasons being all the time on my hands combined with my lack of creativity and a general laziness which prevented me from getting off the couch for too long, this sudden inspiration came from the most unexpected of sources! A friend of mine, in the process of a mundane conversation, casually suggested, “Why don’t you blog?” His impeccable reasoning for the suggestion was that since there was enough number of people writing “all kinds of crap”, the worst he could do was to encourage yet another addition to the list. In the romantic world, I sometimes escape to, things would have been quite different. An unseen tragedy would have befallen me and having found enough courage to get through it and emerge victorious, I would have decided to be benevolent and share my pearls of wisdom with the rest of the world. What better way to do that, than to become a writer! My first venture into the literary world would have been voted a bestseller, with all the leading critics falling over each other to conjure up exotic phrases and adjectives to describe my work. But then, when I return to reality, logically impeccable reasons are good enough!

So, now that I have broken the ice, breached all the barriers, crossed the line over to the other side, strayed into the unknown and, as it turns out, exhausted all the good metaphors and phrases I planned to use in the rest of the article, I don’t really know what I want to write about. I think all the little talks I had with myself have finally lost steam! I had planned elaborately on the starting paragraph and the subtly humourous statements, through which I hoped I would achieve what the title claimed, but I forgot that the head had to have a body to support it. Although it might seem like a strange comparison, if there can exist creatures in this world with just heads and tails, I am sure my little creation can survive too! Nevertheless, if I have managed to amuse at least one among the many who might read this, then I guess the purpose of this article would be achieved.